


now it’s sparkling

by sulfate



Category: Promare (2019)
Genre: Cooking, M/M, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:33:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21944401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sulfate/pseuds/sulfate
Summary: “We didn’t have a lot of kitchens,” Lio says dryly. “Being the internationally wanted leader of a terrorist organisation made it a little difficult to stay in one place long enough to learn how to cook.”
Relationships: Lio Fotia & Gueira & Meis, Lio Fotia/Galo Thymos
Comments: 24
Kudos: 161
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	now it’s sparkling

**Author's Note:**

  * For [labocat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/labocat/gifts).



> hi labocat!! i loved your promare prompts, and i hope this is close to what you were looking for. happy yuletide!

It’s bitterly cold at night in the Arizona desert. Breathing takes a notched blade to Lio’s lungs, each exhale blooming stark silvery white in front of his face. Gueira wraps an arm around Lio’s shoulders, heat seeking itself out, unselfconscious. Lio leans into the solid line of his shoulder. His flames press up against the underside of his skin, drawn to the surface as if magnetised.

Meis is kneeling over a pile of kindling, sparks waterfalling from the tips of his fingers, and he gives a shout of triumph when they catch, spread. There’s a familiar magenta tinge to the flames that leap to life.

“Hello,” Lio says to the newborn fire, solemn. The fire unfurls a tiny curious tendril towards Lio, who meets it with an outstretched finger. Contact, warmth.

On such a small scale he could almost forget the destructive strength behind it. It’s a testament to the degree of Meis’s control, fine-tuned over the years. Sometimes Lio thinks his flames could consume the world whole if he let them.

“Sky’s so clear here,” Meis notes, now unpacking the gains from their last supply run, a small cluster of soup tins. “Good for stargazing. You know much about stars?”

“Not at all,” Lio admits. He reaches out to help Meis, but Meis bats his hands away.

“Different constellations here to what we have back home,” Meis says. “I don’t know a lot about these stars either.”

“We’re in the wrong half of the world,” Gueira mutters. “Anyway, food first, everything else can wait. Check out what else I snagged!” He brandishes a packet of flour. 

“We’re going to cook?” Lio says slowly.

“Damper,” Gueira explains. “To eat with the soup. Type of bread, we make it when we’re out in the bush.”

Lio narrows his eyes. “Do you actually, or is this another yeah-we-Australians-totally-eat-kangaroo-all-the-time thing?”

Gueira grins. “Hey, you liked it! But yeah, nah, we actually do. It’s simple, just flour and water. And butter if we had it.”

Butter doesn’t keep, so it’s not useful. But Lio’ll keep it in mind, for some nebulous time in the future where they won’t have to worry about usefulness. Things should be done properly. Ruffles at his sleeve hems, tips on the arrows he fashions from flame. In the interim, he does his best with what he has. 

Without a mixing bowl, Meis has to make do with an empty can, split apart in four lines with a precise laser of flame and remelted whole into a curved shape. In the frosty air, the metal cools rapidly. Meis tips out a small handful of flour from the packet, then pours just enough water from one of their flasks to cover it, stirring with a finger. Flour, water, flour, water, in careful stages of combination until it forms a sticky dough, taking shape under Meis’s practised hands. Lio watches as he pulls it apart into three chunks, winds each chunk around the end of its own sturdy stick, scrounged up from who knows where in the middle of the desert. Meis hands one to Lio, one to Gueira.

“You’ve gotta be patient,” Meis says. “Keep the dough out of the heart of the fire, let it cook slowly. Too hot and the outside will burn before the inside’s done. It’s an art, see.” He waves his dough-wrapped stick in the air to punctuate.

Lio smiles. He pushes the stick into the fire, holding it on the outer edges where the heat is lower. The dough begins to brown. Alchemical processes Lio doesn’t understand, but he does understand the catalyst. So many things that fire makes possible. 

“I’d kill for some kumera right now,” Gueira says. He sighs, flicks a burning twig further into the fire. “Wrap ‘em with a bit of foil and shove ‘em in under the coals and wait half an hour for a fucking perfect roast. Sweet potato,” he adds, eyes flicking to Lio’s presumably mystified expression. “If we’re ever back in Australia—”

He’s cut off by Lio’s damper sliding off his stick and puddling into the fire with a sad sizzling noise. The shock of it has Lio staring in consternation, and Gueira laughs, shoves his hand into the fire to retrieve the dough. The flames lick at his hand like a friendly dog. He threads the curlicue of dough back onto the end of the stick still in Lio’s grip, pressing it more firmly into place with a few expert taps of his long, crooked fingers.

“There you go, Boss," Gueira says. “Good as new."

The smell has Lio’s mouth watering. How long has it been since they ate something that didn’t come out of a can? It might’ve been the last time they were in the Australian outback, actually. Teeth coming down on grilled kangaroo meat straight out of the fire; Meis had found a fresh carcass earlier that day. It’d been the best thing Lio had ever tasted. How marrow-deep thankful he’d been to be alive, then. Existence was usually a fact, but in front of the fire and beside Meis and Gueira in the most easily defensible position they could be in, he’d understood it as the privilege it was.

Lio’s damper ends up a little too charred on the outside, a little too soft on the inside, but it’s edible. He tears off chunks to dip into a can of tomato soup, also heated over the fire. All of it warm in his belly. Enough to quiet the deeper hunger scratching up his insides, those instincts that demand the fierce exultation of flame freely unleashed. 

“I’ll take first watch,” Lio says firmly, after they’re done. “You two get some rest.”

Protest is immediate, as expected.

“But Boss—”

“What? No, you should rest, we’re fine—”

Lio shakes his head. “Not up for negotiation,” he says, and stares them both down until they relent. 

He does a perimeter sweep, mostly to make sure Gueira and Meis are staying put. Then he settles into place by the fire, crosses his legs. It really is a gorgeous night. Splash of stars overhead, punched out of the velvety sky. So clear there’s perfect visibility for miles around, a total breathless emptiness to the desert. As though they could be the only people in the world. Ice studding his throat when he inhales, but here he has Meis’s fire, warmth calling to warmth. Tomorrow they’ll keep moving east, towards the next city, seeking out new ground to burn, new Burnish to protect. For the moment, they’re safe.

Whatever’s in the pan neither looks nor smells like a fried egg. The dark, oily smoke is probably a concerning sign. Maybe he should’ve picked up on it earlier? Lowered the heat? Lio grimaces. Automatically, he reaches for the nearest edge of the pan to pick it up, get it off the stove. He doesn’t think twice about it. That’s the problem: he doesn’t _think_. As soon as he makes contact with the metal his mind goes blank. It takes a few moments for the pain to hit, and a few more for his brain to even register the sensation as pain at all. 

The pan clatters back onto the stove. Source of heat first: stove off. Then damage control: Lio fumbles for the tap, shoves his hand under the stream of water. Bites down the flinch from the cold, keeps his hand there until it’s numbed over all the way through. Then he turns the tap off, letting his hand drip into the sink. 

He’d wanted a fried egg. How hard could it be to fry an egg? Harder than he’d thought, it seems. Not only has he managed to injure himself, but he doesn’t even have the desired end product as a consolation. Just great. What a start to the day.

He eyes the reddened swatch of skin on his palm, already going shiny. He’s never forgotten the capacity of fire to harm; he’s only new to including himself in that count. Such a strange feeling, being vulnerable to heat. 

Or not so strange. In the core of the Parnassus engine, the tips of his fingers shredding into ash—he doesn’t remember too well; he’d gone half-delirious by that point, pain so implausibly absolute he didn’t have the vocabulary for it. Probably that was the closest a Burnish could get to a burn injury, or had been.

He has to choke down the laugh threatening to bubble over and spill out. Mundane, unthinking things like this, reminders of an instinct excised right out of him, and all he has to show for it is the muscle memory. The icy numbness soaking through his hand is almost worse than the burn itself. Lio doesn’t like it, not being able to feel the heat. This newly breakable body of his.

And Galo strolls into the kitchen, stretching his arms over his head, audible crackle as his joints settle. “What’s—” Galo’s eyes sweep around the room, sharp, first-responder assessment. Lio by the sink, smoke wisping off the pan. “You burned yourself?”

“I forgot," Lio says. He doesn’t mean to inflect the words but they come out disbelieving. 

Galo is quiet for a moment. The same cast to his eyes as that time in the cave, when he’d looked at the shallowing rise and fall of Thyma’s chest and said, unsmiling, _let me help. I can help._

That’s the difference between them now. As he is, Lio can’t save anyone. Galo has nothing but himself and still throws everything into saving others. 

“It’s fine,” Lio says, forestalling Galo’s next words. “I’m fine. I put it under water…”

Galo crosses the tiled floor and takes Lio’s hand, carefully lifting it closer to the light to inspect the burn. The pressure of his fingertips warm and careful against Lio’s skin, skirting the edges of the injury. The burn twinges, nothing Lio can’t ignore. Apparently satisfied, Galo releases Lio’s hand again, but the warmth lingers, blood close to the surface. 

Pushing a hand through his bangs and shaking them out, Galo says, “Do you miss them? Your flames?”

Honesty wells up, helpless, water from a spring. “Yeah,” Lio says. 

Phantom limb ache, half-healed bruise—Lio knows what that feels like, now. The stopped-breath silence as the last of the Promare pulled away from him to return home. That tug like magnets unlocking. Flame to ember to smoke to nothing at all, and then he was alone in the lightless expanse. But here in Galo’s kitchen he has Galo in his space, the keenly attentive spark to his eyes as he watches Lio, waiting him out.

“I didn’t realise,” Lio says, “just how much I relied on them. For these—” He gestures at the stove, the charcoal in the pan.

Galo frowns as he parses through the words. It plays out so clearly over his face, hopelessly endearing. Of course, what Galo settles on is, “You... don’t know how to cook?”

“We didn’t have a lot of kitchens,” Lio says dryly. “Being the internationally wanted leader of a terrorist organisation made it a little difficult to stay in one place long enough to learn how to cook.”

“Hey, no judgement!” Galo’s hands come up. “Heaps of people don’t know how to cook. I just wanted to know. I like knowing stuff about you.”

Lio looks down at the blackened egg. Something as simple as this, he can’t even get it right. But this is Galo, trying to help, trying to save. He recognises it, the core of earnestness that’s never dimmed, not once. He can tell Galo’s aiming for delicacy, and it doesn’t suit him at all, but Lio’s charmed by the gesture. The care behind it. 

So he offers in return: “Gueira and Meis, they can—I made bread with them, once. When we were in the desert.”

Galo lights up. “Remi has a great bread recipe, seriously super delicious,” he says. “I can ask him for it. If you wanna learn?”

Lio listens inwards, half out of unbroken habit, but the only sound of his body is breath, and underneath that a pulse easing itself back into steadiness. Flesh and blood, no more and no less. Worth figuring out how to make the most of that. How to live well with what he has left. What a luxury it is, to set down roots. To allow himself to be someone still capable of learning. 

He says, “I want to learn.”

Galo grins. It’s a full-body sort of expression. Catching, spreading. He says, “Then I’ll teach you! We’ve got time.”

**Author's Note:**

> feel free to let me know your thoughts in the comments <3 you can find me on twitter [@ennezahard](https://twitter.com/ennezahard) and on tumblr [@delineative](https://delineative.tumblr.com)!!


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